Big Supercomputer Gets Much Faster, Aided by New Chips

Twice a year, the people who own and run the world’s biggest computers announce their latest test results. One of the biggest on Monday is formally announcing a kind of brain transplant that should help it move up near the top when the rankings are announced later this month.

That’s a Cray supercomputer installed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, a massive machine called Jaguar that has been powered by chips from Advanced Micro Devices. But the same basic system is being renamed Titan, a rebirth of sorts that reflects not only swapping in new AMD chips but the addition of Nvidia chips of the variety that evolved from the world of videogames.

And there’s a lot of each. Titan has 200 cabinets containing 18,688 circuit modules, or nodes, each with an AMD chip and an Nvidia chip called a graphics processing unit, or GPU.